Stencil coloured films.

By 1906 Charles Pathe, owner of Pathé Frères and a great innovator in the cinematographic industry, already employed 200 workers in his colouring studio in Paris. The method used was that of a manual stencilling developed by Melies and Gaumont: for each colour to be painted on the film a positive copy of the same film is stencil cut by hand and then the emulsion is washed away. For each colour, there is, therefore, a corresponding transparent outline, or stencil, similar to the stencils used for silk screen printing, with the part cut away where that colour should be.

In manual stencilling the worker holds the stencil in the left hand exactly superimposed on the film while, with his right hand, dips the paintbrush into the colour (usually a basic aniline dye, but dyes of all sorts were used), partially dries it on a pad and places it on the stencil. A light stroke is used to transfer the colour through the cutout and onto the emulsion side of the film image.

The result was very precise (provided the stencil had been cut well), but the colouring process was extremely slow. Thus, when Pathe mechanised his production and expanded into markets throughout the world, he had to make some compromises in order to accelerate the process (the Pathe company coloured from 300 to 400 copies of each film by 1910). By 1908, a first version of the mechanical stencilling system was in use. The machine for cutting the stencils was extremely precise, based on a pantograph that enlarged the frame on a piece of opaque glass. The outline of the image that was to be cut out was traced on the glass by the operator using a pointer, which guided the device [not unlike a sewing machine with an oscillating needle], which cut the stencil. The resulting stencils, one for each colour, was a length of film of the same length as the final print. The emulsion was then washed off. The machine for colouring the positive copies used a sprocket wheel, which allowed a stencil and the positive copy to be pulled along together in contact. A velvet ribbon loop, continuously replenished with colouring agent from a tank, acted as the brush, transferring the dye through the stencil to the print. The procedure had to be repeated for each colour.

With the mechanised stencil colouring system as described in the patent literature of the time, it was possible to stencil a film with up to seven different colours at a time, in a single pass through the machine. Several investigators believe that even more than seven stencils were sometimes used. The process was used, with minor differences, by other companies as well, such as Gaumont in France and Ambrosio and Cines in Italy. The system was used less after 1915, though it lasted until the end of the 1920s (Pathé’s colouring studio was closed in 1928) and it seems that the continuous stencilling machinery was considerably more complex than the film processing machinery at that time.

The Pathechrome process, the trade name given to prints made using mechanised stencilling, used dyes applied on top of the black and white silver image, just like early hand colouring, and some of these dyes were the same as those used for dye tinting.

These same nine colours seem to have been in use from early in the century to 1929. The actual dyes used may not have remained the same, however.

Stencilling seems not to have been common in the USA. The Handscheigl Process of 1916 in US was used to colour some 15 or 20 movies and this produces prints with similar appearance.

The process used conventional lithographic printing to create separate printing plates to make up to three colours for printing onto a conventional black and white print. The areas to be coloured were defined by hand for every frame! De Mille's "Joan the Woman" was the first film to use this process, called then the De Mille Process. Eric von Stroheim's "Greed" also used it as well as printing onto yellow tinted film for some sections. The process was also called the Wyckoff Process.